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Friday, February 26, 2010

Political Highlights - Updated

Obama administration officials now say that Baradar is talking a little, that U.S. personnel in Pakistan do have access to him, and that any intelligence that has been squeezed out of him has been shared with American representatives.
But five U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, tell Declassified that the HIG—which the Obama administration has billed as a less-controversial alternative to the Bush administration's use of secret CIA prisons and "enhanced" interrogation techniques that human rights advocates had described as torture—is not being deployed to participate in the questioning of Mullah Baradar. Some of the officials say they find this puzzling, since Baradar, who before his capture served as the Afghan Taliban's top military commander, is widely believed to possess information that might be very useful to U.S. and allied forces fighting his Taliban comrades in Afghanistan.House Inquiry on Trips Is Criticized as Weak

A Congressional inquiry that cleared five House Democrats and lightly admonished Representative Charles B. Rangel for accepting free trips to the Caribbean drew harsh criticism on Friday from some ethics lawyers who said it showed that Congress was still loath to police itself.

Hillary Clinton this week called on Syrian President Bashar Assad to respond to recent US overtures by distancing his country from Iran. Yesterday, Assad responded by signing a new friendship pact with a grinning Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. More, he mocked our secretary of state: "We must have understood Clinton wrong because of bad translation or our limited understanding, so we signed the agreement."